On Saturday, June 20th, in the occasion of the “World Refugee Day”, the Migration Center “Mirekoç”, Koç University will hold a special event “PhotoShow and Documentary Premiere” to critically engage with Turkey, EU and other States and main actors’ responses to the Syrian refugee crises.

According to the latest inter-country report of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), issued on May 7th, 2015, the humanitarian crisis has reached an unprecedented scale: 7.6 million people are internally displaced in Syria, while more than 3.9 million are seeking protection in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey.

The recent Syrian refugee critical situation presented unprecedented challenges and intensified the debates on migration law in Turkey: What is the status of refugees and asylum seeker? Whose responsibility is it to help them? What rights do they have? And how should the financial responsibility be shared?

The event will feature a Photo Show and a Documentary focusing on the impact of the Syrian crisis on Turkey, as a neighboring country, and Turkey’s response to it, followed by a Q&A discussion.

Photoshow: “N-either Refugees, N-or Guests. Refugees in Camps and in the Urban Space in the Turkish Context” directed by Georgiana Turculet

Abstract: P.F. Strawson’s take on Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories in The Bounds of Sense contains stretches of argument as dense, difficult and downright puzzling as anything to be found in Kant. My target in this talk is the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’, in which Strawson argues that ‘for a series of diverse experiences to belong to a single consciousness it is necessary that they should be so connected as to constitute a temporally extended experience of a unified objective world’ (p.97). More prosaically: unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. In this talk I’ll attempt to reconstruct and assess Strawson’s argument. I’ll then use the failure, as I see it, of Strawson’s argument to motivate an alternative connection between unity and objectivity, one which turns on the passivity of perceptual experience.

It is with great pleasure that I would like to inform you of the creation of a Turkish-European Network for the study of women in the history of philosophy.

The purpose of this informal network is to encourage greater exchange between scholars working in Turkey and other European countries on women philosophers at any period in history, and to enable them to join in with the great debates currently taking place in the rest of the world. We will build on existing connections between Yeditepe in Istanbul and Paderborn in Germany and exchange news and ideas about workshops, conferences, resources, publication projects and grant proposals.

We hope that this will encourage researchers to pursue their interests in women philosophers, and perhaps enable the recovery of Turkish and other European women philosophers who have not yet come into the limelight.

So far the following individuals and institutions have volunteered to be…